Legend of the Cyber Heroes
Chapter 811 - 56: Li Zheyuan

Chapter 811: Chapter 56: Li Zheyuan

Li Zheyuan quietly curled up in the darkness. This was the collective dormitory for single workers.

The people living here were all ordinary single workers. After finishing their work, the workers here would remove their worker Prosthetic Bodies and use a Prosthetic Body less than one meter tall, with their heads attached to move freely, looking like some kind of cartoon big-headed doll.

Because their bodies were small enough, the space one person needed could also be small. In a tiny room, setting up a bunk bed like a shelf could accommodate many workers.

This wasn’t abuse. In fact, the workers residing here could go out into space to work. Their income was already considered relatively high among the worker community in the City of Ur. There were many laborers in the city with incomplete modifications, who could only work within the City of Ur, with efficiency far less than these fully modified workers.

A significant portion of this worker group consisted of veterans from the Old Celestial Fleet. The original Usurper of the State force absorbed by the Old Celestial Fleet came from the Federation Navy Fleet. Some soldiers with seniority were only thirty to forty years younger than the Martial Ancestor himself, having experienced the transformation from the "Old Era" to the "present."

King Aqini’s abandonment of the Old Celestial Fleet and the lack of organized rescue measures afterward also made these people completely give up the idea of "fighting" and turn into workers.

This group of people naturally inherited their judgment of material conditions from the Old Era.

They weren’t "stuck here," but rather "felt it was better to stay here."

Compared to the waste excretion of Natural Persons, cybernetically enhanced people didn’t have such worries. Benchmark Men with full Cyberization could function solely on electrical energy, eliminating respiration. Problems like smells and infections brought about by "crowding together" didn’t exist for Benchmark Men.

However, such low-level Prosthetic Bodies didn’t have particularly sharp senses. The sense of oppression from "crowding" did exist.

But entering the virtual world eliminated any problems.

Compared to "living alone in a big house," the workers here preferred to set up local networks, resting online in their leisure time—don’t forget, among the creators of the City of Ur were subordinates of the Fourth Martial God. The Fourth Martial God vigorously promoted online living and online culture.

As for the space outside, it was left for those children who needed activity areas.

This was the hiding place Li Zheyuan had prepared for himself. The lighting was dim, and these former soldiers turned workers were also very exclusionary. If anyone barged in rashly, they would show hostility.

This way, even if there was an error in his performance, it wouldn’t be so conspicuous.

The small piece of lighting in the hallway’s entrance, he had once bribed the repair personnel to make modifications, connecting it to another receiving device.

If that lamp flickered for a prolonged period and continued for a minute, it meant his residence had been raided, and the device at his residence had sent out an alarm signal.

He had set this up a long time ago.

It was part of his many escape plans. After this incident, he couldn’t return to his previous life. He even prepared two escape routes. He had a long-established fake identity locally. Besides, there was a secret key in this Prosthetic Body that could find a merchant to smuggle him to Mars.

But...

"What a shame," he mumbled.

Almost two hundred years. For two hundred years, he had been on the run, never daring to stay in one place too long—before this, he had never lived in one place for more than eight years.

And he had lived in the City of Ur for thirty years.

Thirty years was enough to make him feel a bit of a "hometown" attachment.

—You can’t be like this, Li Zheyuan...

He told himself in his heart.

—It’s because of thirty years of peaceful times that you developed a sense of laziness, leading to being targeted...

—Never idle, keep striving forward, surpass the hardships! That’s your life motto, isn’t it!

Li Zheyuan was born in Seoul on the Korean Peninsula, with eight family members crammed into a room less than forty square meters, facing the surface part of the city’s subway. Whenever trains passed by, it was especially noisy.

After a brief childhood, Li Zheyuan started his youth studying sixteen hours a day.

Among his four siblings, aside from the eldest, incapable sister, all others successfully passed the university academic ability exam and went to university. This made their family the envy of the entire neighborhood. Li Zheyuan was the outstanding one among them. He passed the exam in one go, entered the nation’s top university, and even directly received an offer from Harvard Medical School, becoming the junior to Yawgmoth, who is now the Father of All Machines and was a biologist back then.

If it weren’t for the year his oldest sister, unable to bear the pressure of repeating studies, committed suicide, it might have been a perfect year.

Since then, Li Zheyuan embarked on a life completely different from his brothers and sisters. They graduated from commonly excellent universities, worked for ordinary domestic conglomerates, and led ordinary lives.

After entering the mentor’s lab, Li Zheyuan, through a small group project, left a certain impression on the then-young Yawgmoth.

Relying on this bit of connection, he became one of the scholars recruited by Xiang Shan, becoming a member of a world-class conglomerate...

Ah, those were indeed golden times. No matter how the domestic conglomerates stirred up nationalism, raised the banner of protectionism, or pushed for legal revisions, they couldn’t stop the will of Xiang Shan and Yawgmoth.

Xiang Shan, that prodigy. Through personal relationships, he somehow managed to monopolize the "extraction" of "Eternal Life Technology"—that process akin to "mining," extracting "knowledge" from the "unknown mystery," was somehow grasped by this courageous and foresighted person. He didn’t monopolize knowledge; he shared it. But most of those capable of this "extraction" were under his control.

Li Zheyuan witnessed how those conglomerates that influenced his parent’s generation gradually melted away in the magic of Yawgmoth.

Back then, he even believed in Xiang Shan’s beliefs.

Thinking of this, Li Zheyuan’s hand couldn’t help but squeeze his throat area. Even though this body didn’t need to breathe, having been Homo sapiens, he was used to doing so.

In the darkness, this fellow, despised by everyone, whispered, "I just want... I just want to survive... The ones at fault are Xiang Shan and Yawgmoth... those two lunatics..."

"They are the ones who opened Pandora’s magic box. I didn’t..."